Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [60]
Meanwhile, the master strategist, off in Los Angeles, was sixty-nine years old and a changed man. Thirty years earlier, Mulholland had spent his idle hours in a cabin at one of the city’s outlying reservoirs, reading the classics and planting poplars. When the city had first talked about tapping the Owens River, his concern about the valley’s welfare led him to suggest that the city plant millions of trees which the residents could sell for firewood to the barren mining camps in Nevada—unti! someone informed him that so many trees would suck up enough groundwater to bleed the river dry. In his later years, however, the William Mulholland who had read Shakespeare and quoted Alexander Pope was hardly recognizable. No person ever put his imprint on an agency as strongly as Mulholland left his on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and that agency was now using secret agents, breaking into private records, and turning neighbors into mortal foes. And, worst of all, Mulholland was ignoring a solution that would have satisfied everyone—a dam at Long Valley—out of petty niggardliness and almost fanatical pride.
In 1980, there were few people still alive who remembered Mulholland, but one who did was Horace Albright, the director of the National Park Service under Herbert Hoover. Albright could no longer remember the year—he was eighty-two—but it was probably 1925 or 1926, and he was a young park superintendent invited to attend a testimonial dinner for Senator Frank Flint, the man who had engineered the dubious federal decisions that allowed the Owens Valley aqueduct to be built. Albright was seated at Mulholland’s table, a couple of chairs away, and midway through dinner he felt a rough tap on his shoulder.
“You’re from the Park Service, aren’t you?” Mulholland demanded more than asked.
“Yes, I am,” said Albright. “Why do you ask?”
“Why?” Mulholland said archly. “Why? I’ll tell you why. You have a beautiful park up north. A majestic park. Yosemite Park, it’s called. You’ve been there, have you?”
Albright said he had. He was the park’s superintendent.
“Well, I’m going to tell you what I’d do with your park. Do you want to know what I would do?”
Albright said he did.
“Well, I’ll tell you. You know this new photographic process they’ve invented? It’s called Pathé. It makes everything seem lifelike. The hues and coloration are magnificent. Well, then, what I would do, if I were custodian of your park, is I’d hire a dozen of the best photographers in the world. I’d build them cabins in Yosemite Valley and pay them something and give them all the film they wanted. I’d say, ‘This park is yours. It’s yours for one year. I want you to take photographs in every season. I want you to capture all the colors, all the waterfalls, all the snow, and all the majesty. I especially want you to photograph the rivers. In the early summer, when the Merced River roars, I want to see that.’ And then I’d leave them be. And in a year I’d come back, and take their film, and send it out and have it developed and treated by Pathé. And then I would print the pictures in thousands of books and send them to every library. I would urge every magazine in the country to print them and tell every gallery and museum to hang them. I would make certain that every American saw them. And then,” Mulholland said slowly, with what Albright remembered as a vulpine grin, “and then do you know what I would do? I’d go in there and build a dam from one